When did the rules on Lenten abstinence change

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SeanF1989

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At one point Lenten abstinence wasn’t just about avoiding meat the rules also prohibited eggs, cheese, milk, butter, lard, tallow (and other meat drippings) and stock/gravies.

When did this rule change?
 
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The Church has changed the discipline of abstinence not the doctrine when cultural changes so required.
What is the point of prescribing abstinence from mean to a society that mainly eats veggies?
I can envision in such a society the prescription would be: “Friday abstinence from broccoli” during Lent.
The Church can change these rules when She deems necessary and appropriate.
 
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Actually, the OP is asking a very interesting question. Compare it with the discipline of women not wearing head coverings in Mass. This gradually fell into disuse as society’s customs changed., and the church eventually caught up.

So I wonder if Lenten discipiines gradually became ignored if meat. etc. became more available during the Lenten season, and peasants saw the rich eating better and copied them.? Perhaps farming had improved?

It is plainly a change going back over centuries .Linking it to Vat. 2 is amusing.
 
The OP is asking an interesting historical question and I look forward to seeing some factual answers. The rules change from time to time, and after a few years it can be difficult to find out exactly what changes were made, and when.

We’ve seen the same kind of questions being asked on earlier threads, about how many days there are in Lent, and whether or not Sundays are counted. There is a historical reason for people’s doubts about that. When the forty-day Lenten fast was first introduced, during Constantine’s reign, the duration was exactly forty days, beginning on Quadragesima Sunday and ending on Holy Thursday. At a later date, the Church added four more days at the beginning of Lent, so that it then started on Ash Wednesday. Thus the total duration, instead of forty days, was now extended to forty-four days. That was when people started wondering whether they could legitimately leave out the Sundays, bringing the total down to forty days again, but of course, that didn’t work, because there are six Sundays in Lent, not four.
 
SeanF1989 said:
When did this rule change?
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It would have depended on where you were living. Some places relaxed this discipline earlier than others, because of, for example, given the food available in a certain region, it was simply impractical or even impossible to require the people to regularly refrain from all those food items. (I think such a rationale doesn’t apply so much anymore, given the wide array of food items the typical person can find at the local grocery store…in the USA, at least).

The definitive, worldwide relaxation came with the 1917 Code of Canon Law, which at least initiated the allowance of the consumption of milk/milk products throughout the entire (Latin) Church. My impression is that this Code merely adopted what had become common practice in many/most parts of the world and made it uniform.

Dan
 
JerryZ said:
The Church has changed the discipline of abstinence not the doctrine when cultural changes so required.
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Why would cultural changes demand that abstinence only occur on Ash Wednesday, Good Friday, and Fridays during Lent? If “cultural changes” mean that abstinence from meat doesn’t have the same meaning, that doesn’t answer why abstinence from something isn’t still required.
paperwight said:
Actually, the OP is asking a very interesting question. Compare it with the discipline of women not wearing head coverings in Mass. This gradually fell into disuse as society’s customs changed., and the church eventually caught up.
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The Church “caught up”? To society’s customs? That’s not what the Church should be doing. She does not take cues from society – society should be taking cues from Her.
 
gracepoole said:
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paperwight:
Actually, the OP is asking a very interesting question. Compare it with the discipline of women not wearing head coverings in Mass. This gradually fell into disuse as society’s customs changed., and the church eventually caught up.
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The Church “caught up”? To society’s customs? That’s not what the Church should be doing. She does not take cues from society – society should be taking cues from Her.
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I don’t see how else one can explain the quiet dropping of the head covering rule.

It really wasn’t an important issue for the church, it seemed. Times had changed.
 
We had stopped covering our heads long before the 1983 Code came out. No need to say that a law is repealed by the code when it was already repealed 10 or more years earlier.

As for the Friday abstinence, it is still the universal law but the Church has given the national Episcopal Conferences the right to change that. Jimmy Atkins says that the USCCB did not mandate substituting another penance if one didn’t abstain.

In Canada the decree reads “ In accordance with the prescriptions of canon 1253, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops decrees that the days of fast and abstinence in Canada are Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Fridays are days of abstinence, but Catholics can substitute special acts of charity or piety on this day” I don’t recall ever being told that we could eat meat IF we did something else instead, and neither, it seems, can anyone else.
 
the USCCB did not mandate substituting another penance if one didn’t abstain.

24. Among the works of voluntary self-denial and personal penance which we especially commend to our people for the future observance of Friday, even though we hereby terminate the traditional law of abstinence binding under pain of sin, as the sole prescribed means of observing Friday, we give first place to abstinence from flesh meat. We do so in the hope that the Catholic community will ordinarily continue to abstain from meat by free choice as formerly we did in obedience to Church law. Our expectation is based on the following considerations:
a. We shall thus freely and out of love for Christ Crucified show our solidarity with the generations of believers to whom this practice frequently became, especially in times of persecution and of great poverty, no mean evidence of fidelity to Christ and His Church.
b. We shall thus also remind ourselves that as Christians, although immersed in the world and sharing its life, we must preserve a saving and necessary difference from the spirit of the world. Our deliberate, personal abstinence from meat, more especially because no longer required by law, will be an outward sign of inward spiritual values that we cherish.
 
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Some time in the 20th century. Maybe Vatican 2, but it may have been before that. Eastern Catholics still do the full fast.

It is interesting how fasting and abstinence has changed so much. We are only required to fast 2 times a year and the fast is not extreme at all. I think personally it is too lax. Of course anyone can do more than just the bear minimum and there are other ways to deny oneself
 
The pre-Vatican II rules are described here: Medieval Lent was Harder than Islamic Ramadan - Taylor Marshall .
These were the norms for all Catholics prior to the council and dated back into the early Church. In the early Church some abstained from certain foods and others limited their food to one meal only in the evening. The east adopted the former, and the west the latter. These fasting requirements remained in place until after Vatican II.
 
Here’s a neat little short video I recently stumbled upon that talks about the monastic fasting tradition from a modern perspective:
 
paperwight said:
I don’t see how else one can explain the quiet dropping of the head covering rule.

It really wasn’t an important issue for the church, it seemed. Times had changed.
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Article by Jimmy Akin - Women’s Head Coverings at Mass: Won’t Say I Told You So, But . . . " Some time ago I did a post (possibly more than one) dealing with the subject of women’s headcoverings at Mass—a practice that was required by the 1917 Code of Canon Law but that then fell into desuetude after the Second Vatican Council and was abolished by the release of the 1983 Code of Canon Law."

Head Coverings in Church

What Happened to Head Coverings at Mass? Matt Fradd • 7/23/2013
" This is something that fell gradually into disuse.

In the 1970s there was a judgment issued by the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in a document titled Inter Insigniores that basically stated that since chapel veils were not a matter of faith, it was no longer mandatory for women to wear them. In paragraph 4 it states:"
It then goes on to explain the 1983 Code of Canon Law.

Head Coverings for Women answered by Father Edward McNamara, professor of liturgy at the Regina Apostolorum university.
 
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